Fantasy Football ‘23: The Kickoff!
Who is Ready to Push Through Another Fantasy Season?
(Published June 5, 2023)
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Welcome to another season of Fantasy Football and NFL content from the Pigskin Papers! For those who’ve been with us for any part of the past 2 seasons, welcome back, and for those who are new to the site, welcome aboard. I hope you’ve all had a great off-season so far.
June is here, and that means it’s time to kick off our 2023-24 season-long coverage in earnest. The dynasty folks have been at it for a while - those guys never sleep. But this site focuses mostly on the redraft version of the game we all love, so we’re just getting rolling. If you’ve got a draft coming up in August, it’s not too early to start preparing, or at least to start thinking about your draft strategy.
I’ll hit on some big picture thoughts on that in a second, but before we get started, a quick note on our content for this upcoming season. I hope to provide similar content to last year: plenty of preseason strategy articles to help you with your draft, weekly waiver wire and weekly preview columns in-season to help you manage your lineups and rosters, and a weekly recap column that’s focused more on actual NFL football and less on the fantasy side. Plus, I’m also planning to continue doing fairly regular podcast episodes on the ATB Fantasy pod with my co-host Paul Ryan (YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeoY72_DH1Qrpmwd2_4opEg ; Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/47itXlynjcLechk47gAFig ). You’d think I was getting paid for this. I’m not. But I might again offer 1:1 expert fantasy advice at select times, through the Didit app, which can be downloaded from the App Store (search for Didit: Fantasy Sports Advice).
OK, that’s out of the way. For today, I’d like to kick off the preseason discussion with 3 random thoughts about 2023 draft strategy that have gnawed at me since the end of last season. I’ll probably expand on a few of these concepts in a later piece, as we get closer to draft season. Ready? OK, here we go!
Josh Allen - Fantasy Gold for 3 Years Running
Random Thought #1: This might be the year to rethink the “wait on a QB” strategy, in 1-QB leagues.
I’ll admit it - I was wrong last preseason when I advocated for waiting on a QB. The thinking was that there was great depth of quality at the position, and you could therefore wait and let any old QB in the top 8-12 fall to you. Hopefully, you wouldn’t be that far behind (in QB points) those who took the top QBs. This tactic would allow you to grab valuable RBs and WRs (plus a TE) in all of the early and middle rounds, and then sometime starting around the 7th or 8th round, but preferably even later, you’d be able to nab one of Brady, Rodgers, Russ Wilson, Dak, or Stafford, among others. They all seemed like pretty safe bets to give you a solid floor, with top 5 upside if they hit. If you really wanted to wait, you could let a couple more rounds go by and then grab Cousins or Carr. In auction drafts it would be the same concept - wait, spend your money elsewhere, and then grab a QB late for a few bucks. Well, outside of Cousins (QB9 for the season, excluding Week 18), this strategy failed miserably, and on the flip side, drafters who grabbed Mahomes, Allen or Hurts (especially) on the early side were rewarded handsomely.
The QB position has changed, and that evolution has altered the way we need to think about QBs in fantasy. The continued emergence of some elite passers who can also run, coupled with the influx of more and more QBs who are gifted runners that can pile up fantasy points with their legs, has created a top tier (or two) of elite QBs that is differentiated from the rest of the pack. Last year, the 6 players who averaged more than 20 PPG in Half PPR were all QBs (in order: Hurts, Allen, Mahomes, Burrow, Fields, and Jackson), and the gap from the top 3 in particular to the rest of the position was significant. Trevor Lawrence, the QB 8 on the season, averaged more than 8 fewer fantasy points per game (FPPG) than Hurts, the overall leader at 25.6 FPPG. Look, one season doesn’t equal a trend, but it’s getting harder and harder to argue against taking the very highest scoring players in the game (the 6 QBs noted above) fairly early, or in auction leagues, at a high price. While you certainly could get excellent QB production by waiting a few more rounds for the next tier of QBs (Herbert, Dak, Lawrence and others), it’s much less certain than the production you’re almost surely going to get from the top tier QB options, and especially that elite top 3 of Hurts, Mahomes and Allen. I’ll explain in a later piece why all leagues, except for maybe those that are 14 teams or larger, should play Superflex, which leads to QBs being much more properly valued. But that’s another story for another day.
Taking Kelce Early = Playoffs
Random Thought #2: Travis Kelce is 100% worthy of a mid-first round pick.
You know who’s had a great chance to get in the fantasy playoffs and win leagues? Anyone who drafted Kelce with a second or even early third round pick the last handful of seasons. Kelce is a unicorn in today’s NFL, where consistent producers at TE have become an endangered species. Most fantasy leagues require each team to start a TE, and Kelce is that rare bird who regularly finishes atop his position and stays healthy. It’s not just that Kelce produces great numbers. It’s that he’s outproduced the best players at his position by a staggering amount over the last half decade or so. Over the past 7 seasons, Kelce has finished as the TE1 5 times, and the TE2 the other 2 times (Half PPR). In 2020 he was more than 3 FPPG clear of the TE field and this past season he was a ludicrous 4 FPPG better than the #2 TE on a PPG basis (George Kittle). In terms of total points, Kelce had almost NINETY more than any other TE last season. Move down to a mid-range TE1, and Kelce finished the year averaging about 8 FPPG above the TE6, Evan Engram, and outscored Engram by 120 points. If you add together the TE6 and TE8 on the season (Engram and Pat Freiermuth), the sum total is fewer points than Kelce scored all by himself. I could go on, but hopefully you get the point. Think about what a 100+ point differential means over the course of a season, at a position where not only does everyone have to start a player, but many owners will miss some of their TE1’s better weeks because so few TEs are automatic weekly starts.
On top of all of this, the Chiefs lost JuJu and Mecole Hardman and didn’t really replace them with much. Their top 2 WRs could be Kadarius Toney and Skyy Moore, neither of whom played much in 2022. The opportunity remains for Kelce to dominate targets and scoring chances in one of the NFL’s best and most creative offenses, led by its best QB. The one concern with Kelce is age. He’ll turn 34 in October, and Father Time comes for all athletes eventually. But I’ll roll the dice one more time, at least. Last season, Kelce had an ADP of around 14 and that was too low. Right now his ADP is around 8 or 9, which seems about right, but in a TE premium league you can easily make the case that he should go in the top 5. The TE position should be a little better overall this year but it’s still a wasteland, and Kelce gives you more of a positional advantage than any other fantasy asset.
Looking for a Sure Thing in Round 1? Me too
Random Thought #3: At the top of Drafts, I’m leaning towards the WRs.
If it’s the first round (or early second) and I’m choosing between an RB and WR that are similarly ranked, I’ll take the WR. I just talked about positional advantage, and the main reason why the “top” RBs have always dominated the selections in the first round and a half of fantasy drafts, with just a few WRs sprinkled in, is because of positional scarcity, at a high scoring position. It’s harder to find RBs you’re confident starting in your fantasy lineup every week, as compared to WRs, and so having a stud RB or 2 gives you an important positional advantage, provided they stay healthy and produce. But as more teams deploy RB committees, and RBs continue to get hurt at rates that exceed all other positions in fantasy, it’s gotten harder and harder to realize the potential points you’re drafting when you decide to take an RB early. Throw in that the NFL continues to evolve into more of a passing league, and it’s becoming clearer each year that the very top WRs are almost always worth the asking price, while the best RBs are riskier buys. Recent history shows that the top WRs are more consistent year over year, and more durable, than their elite RB counterparts.
Let’s again look at last season. It’s a small sample size, I know, but the trend line has been there for a few seasons. 12 players had a consensus first round Average Draft Position (ADP) last season (Half PPR), consisting of 7 RBs and 5 WRs, with RBs taking the top 4 spots as is customary. Having 5 WRs in the top 12 in ADP was already a shift from prior years, and later this summer I’ll put at least 7 WRs, plus the aforementioned Kelce, in my top 15 when I do my rankings. Of the 5 WRs in the ADP top 12 for 2022 (in order, Kupp, Jefferson, Chase, Adams, Diggs), only Kupp and Chase didn’t finish inside the top 5 at the position and the top 10 overall (non-QBs), and in both cases that was due to injury, as they both put up elite numbers when they were healthy. As for the RBs, they did better than the year before (which was a complete disaster for first round RBs). Still, of the 7 who had top 12 rankings (in order: Taylor, CMC, Ekeler, Henry, D. Cook, N. Harris, Mixon), only 3 finished inside the top 5 at the position, and worse, those were also the only 3 who finished inside the top 17 players overall (non-QB). Advantage, top WRs. The same look-back exercise yielded even more lopsided results the year before. The bottom line is that the top WR options are more likely to give you the weekly points you expect than the top RB options. As I look now at the current top 8 WRs in ADP for 2023 (Jefferson, Chase, Kupp, Hill, Diggs, Lamb, Adams, A.J. Brown) and the top 8 RBs (CMC, Ekeler, B. Robinson, Taylor, Barkley, CMC, Chubb, Jacobs, Henry), I feel like the WRs on the whole are safer bets, and I’m going to lean that way with my earliest draft capital in most cases. I know I can’t win my league with my first or early second round pick, but I also know I can make it much harder to win if I blow those picks. The risk/reward profile of the very top WRs (and Kelce) just seems better to me.
That’s it for now. Check back soon for more preseason content.
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